Christopher Andrew - The Sword and the Shield

At the beginning of 1976 Marchais privately rebuked the PCF newspaper, L’Humanité, for failing to send a correspondent to meet the exiled Russian dissident, Leonid Plyushch, on his arrival in Paris after being freed from incarceration in a Soviet mental hospital. The Centre interpreted Marchais’s gradual move towards Eurocommunism less in terms of ideological evolution than personal ambition. Even Berlinguer was reported by the KGB as criticizing Marchais for his narrow nationalism and comparing him to the Romanian autocrat Nicola Ceauşescu. The Centre concluded that Marchais would stop at nothing to satisfy his personal vanity. 55

The KGB reported to the Central Committee that it was not until the Twentysecond Congress of the PCF in February 1976 that Marchais felt sufficiently confident of support for his increasingly heretical views within the Party hierarchy to dare to express them openly, despite the opposition of Plissonnier. 56The congress adopted an ambitious Eurocommunist agenda. Marchais took the lead in rejecting the traditional aim of a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in criticizing the “limitations on democracy” in the Soviet Bloc and in committing the PCF to “a democratic road to socialism” which would “foster the free expression of many trends of thought.” To scandalized Soviet loyalists within the PCF, the new Eurocommunist platform seemed to “legalize counter-revolution.” 57Over the next eighteen months the CPSU Central Committee sent three angry letters to the PCF complaining about its policies. 58Behind the scenes the KGB accompanied such irate correspondence with active measures. Among them was operation YEVROPA, begun in 1977 and based on forged CIA documents which purported to reveal an American plot to destroy the unity of the PCF. The Centre hoped that YEVROPA would set some of the Central Committee against Marchais, presumably by implying that he was playing into the hands of the CIA. 59

The KGB, however, had misjudged the strength of Marchais’s ideological deviations. The PCF’s Eurocommunist flirtation had been part of the price it had paid for the alliance with the socialists. The flirtation ended in the summer of 1977 after it became clear that, instead of confirming the Communists as the largest party on the French left, it had led to them being overtaken by the socialists. In September 1977 the left-wing alliance collapsed amid mutual recriminations. Thereafter Marchais and the PCF Central Committee gradually returned to an increasingly uncritical Soviet loyalism. 60In October 1978 the Centre cancelled an active measure devised by the Paris residency to drive a wedge between the PCF and PCI, probably because it was no longer considered necessary. 61

The KGB report on Marchais submitted to the Central Committee in March 1976 reported that he had hanging over him the exposure of his war record. 62Marchais had claimed in 1970 that he had been “requisitioned” in December 1942 to work in a German factory at Lipheim building Messerschmitt fighter aircraft, but had escaped in January 1943 and returned to France. 63The Centre, however, claimed to know “from reliable sources” that the French authorities had documents showing that, far from being forced to work in Germany, he had signed a voluntary contract for a job at Lipheim. The KGB report on Marchais was so hostile that in 1976 it may well have contemplated using his war record to discredit him, just as it hoped to use Berlinguer’s allegedly shady building contracts to destroy his reputation. 64It is unclear, however, whether the KGB did anything to bring to light a document, which was published in 1977 by Auguste Lecoeur, a former member of the PCF Politburo, and the right-wing weekly Minute, showing that Marchais had voluntarily accepted work in the Messerschmitt factory. Marchais claimed that the document was forged and brought a libel suit against both Lecoeur and Minute. At the opening of the trial in September 1977 he burst into tears. He lost both that case and another libel suit in the following year. In March 1980 L’Express published a wartime German document which appeared to show not merely that Marchais had gone voluntarily to work in Germany but that he had stayed there until 1944. On this occasion Marchais did not sue but maintained his innocence, declaring that he was the victim of an improbable plot by his rivals in the 1981 presidential elections: “That is why, at the origin of this calumny, there have been successively discovered close collaborators of Giscard d’Estaing, of Chirac, and of François Mitterrand.” 65

The PCF entered the 1980s in a mood of unswerving loyalty to Moscow. No other leader of a major Western Communist Party matched the zeal with which Marchais defended the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Two years later the PCF sycophantically greeted the outlawing of Solidarity and the declaration of a state of emergency in Poland as a “triumph” for the Polish Communist Party. At the same time, however, the PCF was in steep electoral decline. In the 1981 presidential election Marchais gained only 15 percent of the vote—easily the Party’s worst result since the Second World War. In 1986 the PCF vote fell even more precipitously, to 6.8 percent, in the parliamentary elections. 66

THE GORBACHEV ERA brought a sea change in the CPSU’s relations with foreign Communist Parties. The PCF and Moscow’s other most faithful Western followers were increasingly outraged to discover that their loyalism was no longer appreciated. Gorbachev himself appeared far more interested in imaginative heresy than in intellectually sclerotic orthodoxy. Eurocommunism seemed to have conquered the Kremlin. As head of the CPSU delegation to Berlinguer’s funeral in June 1984, Gorbachev was deeply impressed by the spontaneous outpouring of grief by a million and a half mourners crowded into Rome’s Piazza San Giovanni. 67One of the first signs of his “new thinking” when he became CPSU general secretary in March 1985 was the fact that the only European Communist leader included in his meetings with world statesmen after Chernenko’s funeral was Berlinguer’s successor, Alessandro Natta. Ponomarev was visibly shocked. How could it be, he asked his colleagues in the international department, that despite the presence of so many leaders of “good” Communist Parties in Moscow, Gorbachev had bestowed his favor instead on the general secretary of the “bad” PCI? 68

Over the next five years Gorbachev repeatedly conferred with PCI leaders, praised their policies and used them as sounding boards for his “new thinking” on social democracy and East-West relations. 69In Spain Gorbachev showed far less interest in the tattered remnants of the PCE 70than in the ruling Socialist Party. Gorbachev’s press secretary, Andrei Grachev, once asked him which foreign politician he felt closest to. Gorbachev’s reply was unhesitating: Felipe González. According to Grachev, Gorbachev “did not just appreciate ‘Felipe,’ he loved him.” 71

Dependence on secret Soviet subsidies, however, persuaded some of the affronted hardline foreign Communist leaders to swallow their pride. In June 1987, Marchais sent a groveling message to Gorbachev conveying his “deepest gratitude” for meeting him in May and asking for “emergency financial aid” of 10 million francs (1.65 million dollars) to prepare for the 1988 presidential elections. 72Noting that the PCF had already received 2 million dollars during 1987, the Politburo none the less agreed to supply another million via the KGB. 73

For Gus Hall, the hardline leader of the ever-faithful CPUSA, Gorbachev’s “new thinking” proved too much in the end. Goaded for the first time in his career into open disagreement with Moscow, he launched a public attack on Gorbachev’s reforms in 1989, only for his secret Soviet subsidies to be abruptly cut off. The impact on the CPUSA was devastating. Plunged into an immediate financial crisis, it was forced in 1990 first to cut the publication of the Party newspaper, the People’s Daily World, from five to two days a week, then to turn it into a weekly. 74Armando Cossutta spoke for many traditional Moscow loyalists in Western Communist Parties when he declared his disgust after the failure of the August 1991 Moscow coup that “the term ‘Communism’ is now a dirty word even in the land of Lenin.” 75